Baruch 6:42

Verse 42. Women. Aristophanes calls harlots, “corded bodies.” Eccles. Acts 1. The women of Babylon “prostituted themselves once, in honour of Venus, ( Bible. Mylitta. Calmet.) sitting with crowns on their heads in the temple, till some stranger selected them, and took them from their partition, made with cords,” ( Bible.) to some more secret place, where they broke their bands. Herod. i. 199. Calmet.—That some deluded women, led by various desires, should think thus to honour that impure deity, by an action which some modern casuists have not scrupled to rank among simple venial sins, cannot excite our astonishment so much, when we reflect on the tenets of the ancient Gnostics, and of Antinomians at the present day, whom J. Wesley, the last founder of the Methodists, applauded and followed even in the meridian of the gospel light! See Deuteronomy 16:22 and 23:17. Yet these men read and perhaps distributed the Bible!—Stones. Lit. “bones;” ( Bible.) or the refuse of what had been crushed, (πιτυρα. Athen. ii. 14.) to excite impure love. Menochius. Tirinus.—Theocritus (Phar.) represents a witch doing the like; and Sanchez tells us, that some were taken in the fact in Spain. Calmet.—Fumigation, used by the Babylonians after marriage, (Herod. i. 198.) may be insinuated. Grotius.